Friday, December 30, 2016

In early
December, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry
removed SEIU Local 99 President Barbara Torres from office and
suspended her membership in SEIU for four years, according to notices
distributed to union members and also available online. Henry also
removed a second officer, Executive Board member Jacqueline Brown, and appointed Eliseo Medina to serve as a “monitor” of Local 99.

Based in Los Angeles, SEIU Local 99 represents 25,000 public school workers.

According to
SEIU, the actions came after “a thorough investigation and hearing by SEIU
International” that reportedly was prompted by charges against union officials.

In October,
SEIU’s International Executive Board held two days of hearings in Las Vegas to
investigate separate
charges filed against the top leaders of SEIU Local 1107, according to the Las
Vegas Review-Journal. Local 1107 represents approximately 9000 workers in
Nevada.

Eliseo
Medina’s assignment to Local 99 is his second such gig in a handful of months. In
August, Henry appointed Medina as the “trustee” of SEIU Local 73 after she imposed
a trusteeship on the Chicago-based union, which represents 25,000 public-sector
workers in Illinois and northwestern Indiana.

Medina addressing Local number 73 members in Chicago

Readers may
recall that Local 99 has a troubled history of scandals and corruption by its top
officials.

In 2004, Andy Stern appointed Bill Lloyd as the trustee of Local 99.

Lloyd,
who subsequently took on the job of Local 99's Executive Director, pocketed no fewer than three separate paychecks from SEIU totaling $224,000
a year along with multiple perks including an eight-year-long, SEIU-paid
hotel room at the Wilshire Grande Hotel.

Lloyd is
also known for his infamous sexual
affair with Local 99’s then-president, Janett
Humphries, at the same time that she was embezzling tens of thousands of
dollars from the union's members. In 2006, Humprhies pleaded guilty in federal
court to four counts of embezzlement and one count of conspiracy.

In 2012,
Lloyd silently disappeared
from his job as the Executive Director of Local 99.

Max Arias currently serves as Local 99’s
Executive Director. Arias, a former staffer at SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, parachuted into California in
2009 as part of SEIU’s trusteeship of SEIU-UHW. Arias was initially assigned to
nursing homes, where workers reported
about his disrespectful attitude towards workers.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

According to
multiple press outlets, SEIU
President Mary Kay Henry issued an
internal memo on December 14 announcing plans for a 30% cut to SEIU
International’s budget in 2017. Tasty’s sources say the plan calls for cuts of 10%
in January 2017 and another 20% in July 2017.

In the memo,
Henry says the cuts are necessary due to the Republican Party’s imminent control
of all three branches of the federal government. Here’s an excerpt from her
December 14 memo, according to Bloomberg:

Because the far right will control all three
branches of the federal government, we will face serious threats to the ability
of working people to join together in unions. These threats require us to make
tough decisions that allow us to resist these attacks and to fight forward
despite dramatically reduced resources.

Tasty believes
the story behind the cuts is more complex than what SEIU describes in its memo.

More than 18
months ago, SEIU and AFSCME began merger
talks spurred by concerns about Friedrichs
v. California Teachers Association, the U.S. Supreme Court case that could
weaken public-sector unions by challenging their right to collect fair share
fees from nonmembers to cover the costs of representation, such as negotiating
contracts. In February 2016, the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia left
the court deadlocked on the Friedrichs case and apparently slowed the two
unions’ merger plans.

In May 2016,
SEIU approved a resolution leaving open the possibility of a full-blown merger
while immediately calling for joint planning, organizing, bargaining, and
political work between the two unions. In July 2016, AFSCME approved
a nearly identical resolution.

With the
election of Trump in November, both unions are likely speeding up their merger
plans -- which undoubtedly will require the elimination of duplicate functions,
departments, etc at the two unions. Tasty guesses this helps explain SEIU’s announcement
of rapid budget cuts.

It also helps
explain why other unions with large public-sector memberships haven’t also
announced deep budget cuts.

SEIU's Mary Kay Henry

So why doesn’t
Henry’s budget-cut memo mention the AFSCME merger? It’s easier to win the staff’s
support for layoffs based on Trump.

If Tasty’s
theory is correct, we’ll likely see evidence of expedited merger activity in
the months ahead… and perhaps budget cuts at AFSCME as well.

As far as eliminating
waste, SEIU should start by axing some of its highly paid officials inhabiting
the top floors of the Purple Palace. For example, over a number of years, SEIU
has almost doubled the number of its full-time “Executive Vice Presidents” (from
four to seven EVPs).

The latest increase came in May of 2016 when SEIU boosted
the number of EVPs from six to seven-- at the same time that it passed the AFSCME
merger resolution to prepare for SEIU's declining membership. Makes total sense,
right?

Each EVP
earns more than $200,000 a year, according to financial records. If you
eliminate four of them, that’s more than $1 million in savings a year when you factor in benefits, etc.

The runoff
election -- which took place December 14-15 -- followed a
late-November election in which AFT's Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals was the top vote-getter yet failed to secure
an outright majority as required by NLRB rules.

In last week’s
runoff, workers’ support for SEIU dropped sharply. In fact, SEIU’s vote total
dropped by more than one-third -- from 171 in the November election to only 110 in
last week’s vote.

On December 16, the AFT issued a press release quoting President Randi Weingarten: "I'm thrilled to welcome the service and maintenance workers at PeaceHealth Southwest into the AFT family... The AFT continues to grow as a healthcare union..."

SEIU Local
49 is headed by Meg
“I Love the Boss” Niemi, a close ally of SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan. Niemi is also a member of SEIU’s International
Executive Board.

Friday, December 16, 2016

In Nevada, SEIU Local 1107 appears to be imploding
amid intense infighting between the union’s top officials.

The union -- also known
as “SEIU Nevada” -- represents approximately 9,000 workers in public and
private hospitals as well as local government workers.

So what’s
going on?

It’s kinda hard
to track all of the grimy details of this multidimensional sh*tfest, but here
are a few tidbits:

In August, police
were called to the union’s offices when the union’s Executive Vice President (Sharon Kisling) allegedly chased and
threatened one of the union’s staff directors in what he called “a
two-and-a-half-hour reign of terror at our office,” according to the Las Vegas
Review-Journal (“Fight
within SEIU Local 1107 shows no sign of slowing down,” December 3, 2016).
The staff director later reportedly got the courts to issue a temporary
restraining order against Kisling.

In July, the
union’s president, Cherie Mancini,
abruptly canceled a contract-ratification vote at Las Vegas’s largest hospital
(University Medical Center) so she
could supposedly investigate a bunch of vague allegations against unnamed
members of the rank-and-file bargaining committee.

What kind of
allegations did she want to investigate?

They
included such specifics as “violation of fiduciary duty,” “failing to conduct
bargaining in a prudent manner,” and “behavior inconsistent with the mutually
agreed upon interest-based bargaining process.” Oh, and she apparently had no named accusers.

After 400 hospital
workers signed a petition against the union’s president, President Mancini reversed
her decision and allowed the membership vote to take place. Nonetheless, the
bargaining team was pissed that the union’s president had trashed their reputation by circulating “wildly absurd allegations” in a memo she emailed to
all of their co-workers and also posted on the Internet.

So, on July 31, the bargaining team sent a letter to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry saying they had “lost all confidence” in the local union president. They called on Henry to put the union in trusteeship and remove their president from office. Their letter to Henry reads in part:

It is unacceptable that SEIU President
Mancini has done great and unforgivable damage to the SEIU-UMC bargaining team
by publicly making false allegations without a second thought as to what it
would do to the members of this union… President Mancini has shown disdain, disrespect
and complete ignorance for our duly elected SEIU officers and volunteer
bargaining team and for these reasons, we feel that President Mancini is either
mentally unable or unwilling to carry out her sworn duties… UMC Bargaining Team
is also demanding that Local 1107 be trusteed and reconstructed so that this
type of situation, where a Union President publicly attacks its own Union
members, will never happen again. Our team and UMC members believe that the
organization of SEIU Local 1107 has lost sight of working for our members’
common good and has let personal politics and greed take control and we reject
this!

Next, in
September, the union’s President and Executive Vice President filed dueling “internal
charges” against one other alleging violations of SEIU’s constitution and
bylaws. The charges -- which allege “financial malpractice” and “engaging in
corrupt or unethical practices” -- call on SEIU’s International Executive Board
to suspend each other from office.

SEIU's IEB on a break?

In October, just in case
this circus-like situation wasn’t whacky enough, SEIU’s
International Executive Board held two days of hearings in Las Vegas to
investigate the charges. And the Purple Palace chose the perfect setting for
their hearing: the Circus CircusCasino!

Meanwhile, an
independent union called the “UMC-Clark
County Public Employees Association” is actively trying to decertify SEIU.

Oh, and that’s
not all.

In February
2017, SEIU Local 1107’s former president, Al
Martinez, is scheduled to go on trial in civil court over allegations that
he misappropriated approximately $50,000 of union funds, according to a
separate article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (“Gov.
Brian Sandoval cites lawsuit for PERS Board member’s removal,” October 3,
2016).

So… if any
readers are headed to Vegas, keep your eye out for the next three-ring carnival act (also known as the SEIU International Executive Board) at a casino near you!

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Late last
month, the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT) bested SEIU Local 49
in a head-to-head election for 900 non-union hospital workers in Vancouver,
Washington, according to NLRB records and press reports.

Here’s the
final tally of the election at PeaceHealth
Southwest Medical Center held November 21-22:

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